Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Give yourself a break; you can’t learn properly without down time!

Working life can be
stressful enough without the burden of CIMA exams. While trying to
juggle other responsibilities, it’s incredibly easy for working
CIMA students to think ‘I can always do my revision another time’.
But can you leave your revision until the last minute and
still get the results you want from your CIMA exams?

The short answer is no, this kind of studying won’t work for your CIMA exams. Many of us know what it’s like to spend a sleepless night before an exam going over and over study notes – I did it myself once or twice during during my degree! However, as well as being very unpleasant and stressful, this kind of studying doesn’t work very well, according to science.

Revising over a
short period of time without breaks is no good for
knowledge-retention. One prominent example of this comes from
Sheffield University, where research showed that leaving a day
between practice sessions of a game was a much better way to learn
skills than continuously playing the game.

Information will be
retained better if you give yourself significant breaks between study
periods for your CIMA revision. Continuous studying might feel like
it will help, but your brain won’t absorb the information well
unless you give yourself some breathing time.

Having said that,
you need to make sure you give yourself sufficient study time to
cover all the material and still have the learning breaks that
your brain needs. That’s why Astranti’s CIMA Case Study courses,
which are packed of resources and come with a detailed two month
study plan, are a great way for you to retain information ahead of
your CIMA Case Study sitting.

For those of you
studying for CIMA OT exams, I would suggest you also get hold of your
study material months before the exam, to make sure that you have
enough time ahead of you to study the material with adequate breaks.
In case you didn’t know, Astranti offer free study texts and
mini-mocks for all CIMA Objective Test subjects as part of the
professional qualification, so these resources would be a good place
for you to start your long-term revision plan. You can find those
here.

It’s true that you
might pick up a few things from continuous, last-minute study and
it’s certainly a lot better than walking into your CIMA exam
without knowing anything – however, I’m sure none of you CIMA
students would be silly enough to do that!

I hope this has been helpful for all you CIMA students! Don't forget to follow Astranti on Twitter and like us on Facebook to get the latest info on all Astranti discounts and offers. Until next time, happy studying!